In many systems, computing devices may store or access data in external storage devices. Such an interface between computing and storage devices may be implemented according to many different methods. For example, the computing device may access records in a database according to the lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP). In such arrangements, it is often advantageous to maintain a persistent connection to the external storage device such that the overhead associated with establishing a new connection is not encountered whenever a device wished to create, read, update, or delete (CRUD) a record stored by the storage device.
As the state of the network, computing device, or storage device changes however, a cached connection may become unusable, or “dirty.” Such a dirty connection may occur, for example, when a storage device reboots, switches over to a new primary storage device in a redundant pair, or when there are network connection problems. After a connection becomes dirty, subsequent attempts by the computing device to use the connection for a CRUD operation may fail.